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Renai LeMay at ZDNet Australia:
Microsoft has temporarily halted development work on some aspects of its upcoming professional graphics application as it tries to bring companion tools and its next-generation Windows Vista operating system to market.
The application — called Expression Graphic Designer — was first released in test form in June last year, and is based on Expression, the tool Microsoft acquired with its 2003 purchase of Hong Kong company Creature House. But despite being widely seen as a rival for Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator products, Microsoft does not see the product as a stand-alone offering.
“At the moment, there’s no great reason for us to release it as a stand-alone product,” the company’s senior product manager for the for the Europe, Middle East and African professional designer markets, Wayne Smith, said last week during a trip down under.
In an interview with ZDNet Australia, Smith explained that Microsoft was taking so long to bring Graphic Designer to market because the company had put “a lot” of the development work for the application “on pause”, until sibling products and Vista could be finalised.
There are more details by following the link, but apparently the Microsoft view is that Graphic Designer is merely an accompaniment to Expression Web Designer (“Quartz”) and Interactive Designer(“Sparkle”) (so much for the “Photoshop Killer” description) and since they are all based on the WinFX technologies coming with Vista, there was no reason to keep pushing since Acrylic was so far ahead.
Frankly, I find this rather odd. All of these products are supposed to ship in some proximity to the Vista launch at the end of the year and the idea that any of the product teams has time to spare is certainly a novelty. Finally, while the March Community Technology Previews of Acrylic and Sparkle were just released, there has never been a CTP for Expression Web Designer (“Quartz”) which is supposed to be one of the replacements for FrontPage with Office 2007. Maybe the Acrylic team is over there helping out?
Autodesk, Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today announced an expansion of their existing strategic alliance to enable customers to more easily create, manage, and share critical design data at every stage of the project and product life-cycle processes. The companies announced the completion of the first phase of the expanded alliance, which includes the availability of new Autodesk DWF (Design Web Format) functionality to allow customers to easily integrate design information from Autodesk applications with Microsoft(R) Office applications and Microsoft Business Solutions-Great Plains(R) and Microsoft Business Solutions-Axapta(R), now part of Microsoft Dynamics(TM).
As a part of the expanded alliance, the companies also agreed to further align their respective technologies, including expanded Microsoft support for Autodesk’s DWF functionality and plans for Autodesk to support Microsoft XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language).
At the least, the latter implies a version of Autodesk supporting the graphics bells and whistles provided by Avalon in Vista and perhaps in the backported version coming for Windows XP as well.
While it’s easy to create little demos of Avalon (Windows Presentation Foundation – WPF) using an editor and XAML, it has cried out for a visual designer. MSDNTV has just posted a video titled Introducing “Cider”: The Visual Studio Designer for WPF (“Avalon”) featuring Product Managers Mark Boulter and Mike Harsh giving an overview of “Cider”, the visual designer for Windows Presentation Foundation that will be part of the future Orcas version of Visual Studio.
Cider is intended for development of line of business applications and is the equivalent of today’s Windows Forms designer but for Avalon with XAML as the underlying language. They also show adding fancy styling with the Sparkle graphics designer.
(Note: To see the actual demo, you’ll have to download it here.)
